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Affiliate Marketing

Dipping Our Toes In PPC – Part 5

Here are five final (I think final) things I want to mention about our first PPC campaign:

It still is not clear to me why we have no impressions from the YSM content network. I emailed support about this and was basically told the content network traffic is irregular because it does article matching for the ad, landing page, etc. That still seems odd to me since our campaign ran for most of the last few weeks. Call me crazy but I would expect at least ONE impression from the content network! I mean, we did get thousands from the search network.

Landing pages/sites are the weakest link in our chain. We need a lot of education and practice here to really start converting better. The good news is that analyzing what your visitors do tells you a lot about what to change. In our case, it is guiding us in a different direction than we originally intended for Niche Site 3.

As I mentioned before, one of our keywords far outperformed the others. What we did not know until recently was that one of the pages on our landing site got the bulk of the traffic (there were not enough clicks yet to make judgments). It did not take too long to realize what the visitors really wanted from the keyword, the ad, and the site. There was problem with our affiliate program advertiser. It turned that once people left our site and tried to buy the product, they were greeted with a “product no longer offered message.” Nothing about the product page told us that until we actually tried to buy something from them. This happened for four of the six products on our most popular page. Not cool.

One strategy we might try is using PPC to test new sites. It is really easy, and not necessarily that expensive, to see what visitors do and think about your site. Then after collecting some real data, turn off the campaign, do SEO, build up content, and get back links for the long term.

It is not as complicated as we thought. There are a lot of steps involved but you can work on everything in stages. Things do change rapidly but, as the more experienced people say, you can test, test, test all the way to the bank.

We are by no means experts but we just started trying more offers. Before long, I think we will have the hang of this.